Local area networks (LANs) are becoming increasing sophisticated, with several layers of protocols serving several purposes in routing and administering traffic on the LAN. Increasingly, routers are being used to connect one or more LANs together and to file servers, printers and other centrally located services. A router may change or translate the protocol of one LAN to the protocol of another as part of its function. By using a router, several diverse LANs may be connected to each other and also share common resources. Routers generally require that, in order to transmit a message from one LAN to another or to the common resources, the message must have an inter-network identification (Internet ID) of the sending or receiving node of the LAN.
One of the characteristics of most routers is that they do not translate and distribute broadcast messages from clients on one LAN to other LANs or to common resources. This design evolved because the distribution of broadcast messages caused severe inter-network congestion that results in blocking of other messages. However, this design causes an important group of LAN clients to be cut off from inter-network communications and central services.
Any LAN client that does not have writable, non-volatile memory is cut off from such inter-network communications and services until properly initialized. If a LAN client has a writable, non-volatile store, such Internet ID information can be stored therein, and will be available following any occasion when the LAN client is taken out of service and its other memory contents destroyed. As stated above, in order to establish inter-network communication, a LAN client must have an Internet ID. However, work stations that do not have a disk system and development or test models in systems laboratories frequently do not have writable, non-volatile memory necessary to store the inter-network identification (Internet ID) necessary to communicate through a router. When such a work station or test system is initially connected to the LAN, or connected to the LAN following being taken out of service with contents of memory cleared or otherwise destroyed, it sends a broadcast message to the file server where Internet IDs are stored, requesting its Internet ID. Since the router does not distribute broadcast messages, the Internet ID request is not delivered to the file server. The solution of providing a file server for each LAN is very expensive and further introduces problems of concurrently updating all of the file servers.
Therefore, a problem in the art is that there is no inexpensive apparatus and method to provide an Internet ID to LAN clients that do not have writable, non-volatile memory.